By James Baker
The Times, 04 December 2006
The Former Secretary of State heads the Iraq Study Group, which publishes on Wednesday its long-awaited review of US operations in Iraq. In his memoirs he recounts his thoughts about the importance of removing Saddam Hussein and the difficulties of occupying the country.
For years, the question I was most often asked about Desert Storm is why we did not remove Saddam Hussein from power. [The answer is that] A coalition war to liberate Kuwait could then have been portrayed as a US war of conquest. Furthermore, even if Saddam were captured and his regime toppled, American forces would still have been confronted with the spectre of a military occupation of indefinite duration to pacify a country and sustain a new government in power. The ensuing urban warfare would surely have resulted in more casualties to American GIs than the war itself, thus creating a political firestorm at home.
And as much as Saddam’s neighbours wanted to see him gone, they feared Iraq would fragment in unpredictable ways that would play into the hands of the mullahs in Iran, who could export their brand of Islamic fundamentalism with the help of Iraq’s Shias and quickly transform themselves into a dominant regional power.
Finally, the Security Council resolution under which we were operating authorised us to use force only to kick Iraq out of Kuwait, nothing more. As events have amply demonstrated, these concerns were valid. I am no longer asked why we did not remove Saddam in 1991!
Am I implicitly criticising President George W. Bush for having done, 12 years later, what his father’s Administration declined to do in 1991? No, I am not. Iraq’s continued violation of UN resolutions and its expulsion of weapons inspectors in 1998 prompted the Clinton Administration to adopt regime change in Iraq as US policy — a policy President George W Bush also followed. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, US patience with Saddam Hussein finally ran out.
By 2003 the Iraqi dictator had thumbed his nose at UN resolutions for 12 years, turned the UN’s Oil-for-Food programme into a cesspool of corruption (what one critic called an oil-for-palaces programme), and continued to abuse his own people. Every intelligence service in the world, including those in Russia and France, also believed — erroneously, it now appears — that Iraq still possessed weapons of mass destruction. I do not doubt that President George W. Bush, in acting militarily against Iraq, weighed the concerns we considered in 1991. He simply decided that the costs I had described in 1995, though real, were justified in 2003. That’s why the buck stops in the Oval Office.
In an August 2002 op-ed column in the The New York Times, seven months before hostilities began, I argued that “the only realistic way to effect regime change in Iraq is through the application of military force, including sufficient ground troops to occupy the country (including Baghdad), depose the current leadership and install a successor government”. But “it cannot be done on the cheap”, I counselled.
The right way to proceed, both politically and substantively, I said, was to seek a Security Council resolution requiring Iraq to “submit to intrusive inspections anytime, anywhere, with no exceptions, and authorising all necessary means to enforce it”. If Saddam employed his usual cheat-and-retreat tactics (as he subsequently did), I argued, we should then act to remove him from power.
I also warned that winning the peace would be difficult and potentially costly — politically, economically and in terms of casualties. “We will face the problem of how long to occupy and administer a big, fractious country and what type of government or administration should follow.” I wrote: “Unless we do it the right way, there will be costs to other American foreign policy interests, including our relations with practically all other Arab countries (and even many of our customary allies in Europe and elsewhere) and perhaps even to our top foreign policy priority, the war on terrorism.”
The costs could be reduced, I said, “if the President brings together an international coalition behind the effort. Doing so would also help in achieving the continuing support of the American people, a necessary prerequisite for any successful foreign policy”.
In January 2003, the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy and the Council on Foreign Relations published a joint study entitled Guiding Principles for US. Post-Conflict Policy in Iraq. “There should be no illusions that the reconstruction of Iraq will be anything but difficult, confusing and dangerous for everyone involved,” the report said, warning that a long-term US occupation “will neither advance US interests nor garner outside support”.
The working group recommended that the Iraqi army be preserved, not disbanded, to serve as a guarantor of peace and stability, and declared that it was wishful thinking to suggest that Iraqi oil revenues would be sufficient to pay for post-conflict reconstruction.
President George W Bush did, in fact, win a unanimous Security Council resolution in November 2002, demanding that Iraq comply or face serious consequences. To help its most steadfast ally, Tony Blair, the Administration later sought a second resolution that would have defined “serious consequences” to mean the use of force. The Security Council, led primarily by France, balked.
In retrospect, it was a mistake to have sought the resolution without first knowing that we could get the votes to pass it. Better to have just put our own interpretation on “serious consequences” and gone ahead without trying and failing to get a second resolution. I wrote in February 2003 that the United States could not permit itself to be held hostage by the lowest common denominator of opinion on the Security Council.
Acting in reliance on the first UN resolution and congressional authority, the United States led a coalition of the willing into battle against Saddam Hussein’s army in March 2003, winning quickly, decisively, and predictably.
Unfortunately, the formulation and implementation of policy in the lead-up to, and aftermath of, the war were negatively affected by substantial and continuing turf battles between the State Department and the CIA on one side, and the Defence Department and the Vice-President’s office on the other.
The Defence Department made a number of costly mistakes, including disbanding the Iraqi army, pursuing de-Baathification too extensively (and thereby prohibiting many qualified Iraqis from serving in a successor Iraqi government), failing to secure weapons depots, and perhaps never having committed enough troops to successfully pacify the country.
One thing is for sure: the difficulty of winning the peace was severely underestimated. Despite the troubles that have followed, however, the Iraqi people are better off now than under their murderous dictator. In polling released while I was writing, seven in ten Iraqis said their lives were going well and two-thirds expected things to improve in the year ahead.
Once again, sacrifice by America and its allies has brought down a totalitarian government and delivered a degree of hope for political, economic and personal freedom to an oppressed people. But the costs to our nation — primarily in terms of sacrifice by brave young Americans and their families, but also the economic, diplomatic, political and military costs — are very real and cannot be ignored.
Those costs will have been worth paying, however, if we can promote progress toward representative government and individual freedom for many countries and people of the Middle East. The jury is still out on whether we will succeed, although Iraq has held democratic elections, as have the Palestinians, notwithstanding that the results in each may prove unfavorable to US interests.
In addition, the Cedar Revolution has ended the 29-year Syrian occupation of Lebanon, and Libya has given up its weapons of mass destruction programmes.
Regardless of one’s views about the wisdom of going to war in Iraq, what is important today to our country’s international political, diplomatic, and military credibility is that we find a way to manage the end game effectively and successfully. The “Lebanonisation” of Iraq through a descent into sectarian fragmentation and violence, or an Iraq that erupts into full-blown civil war, or an Iraq with a government hostile to America — each would be an extraordinarily undesirable result for the United States, the region, and the world.
Unfortunately, the jury also remains out on whether these outcomes can be avoided.
A political life
1930 Born in Texas, graduated Princeton in 1952, practised law
1975 Under-Secretary of Commerce
1981-1985 White House Chief of Staff to President Reagan 1985-1988 Treasury Secretary, implementing tax reform
1989-1992 Secretary of State 1993 Left White House when Clinton became President
1997-2004 Served as personal envoy of Kofi Annan, to seek political solution to Western Saharan conflict
2006 Iraq Study Group chairman
Sources: Princeton University Library and Times Archives
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Citation: James Baker. "I am no longer asked why we did not remove Saddam," The Times, 04 December 2006.
Original URL: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2485825,00.html
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